Facebook Needs An Email Service
Posted by Nick O'Neill on March 14th, 2008 1:00 PMAsk Mark Zuckerberg and he’ll tell you, Facebook’s goal is to create the most accurate representation of our “social graph.” There’s only one problem with Facebook’s attempt so far though: all our interactions don’t take place within Facebook. We send instant messages to our friends, send at replies on Twitter, have telephone conversations and exchange emails. All of these things help construct the summation of our interpersonal communication.
When tracked, all of these messages help us to understand how we are individually connected with others and the strength of those bonds. While time spent with an individual may not be directly proportional to the strength of our bond, it is at least relatively proportional. Facebook would be fooling themselves if they believed that all of our communication will be boiled down to wall posts and inbox messages.
When speaking with one Facebook employee earlier this week I said that they are in an interesting position where for the first time in a while, adding an email service to their site would actually be beneficial to the users (this is in contrast to the first wave of websites where “adding an email service” was how startups intended to attract users). The employee hadn’t thought about it previously but agreed that a robust messaging service with filters based on the strength of our personal ties would be highly useful.
While having all of our communication with other individuals monitored by companies has massive privacy implications, the benefits gained from having a single place to aggregate our communication and automatically manage it would be extremely useful. The next step for Facebook is to build a more robust messaging system or email service that helps to further optimize our communication as well as our newsfeed. Do you think a Facebook email service would be useful?
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the easiest thing to do is to get google to buy them.
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But on the other hand it kinda scary from the privacy prospective that **ALL** of people's communication would be stored in the same database!
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Society would crumble.
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It definitely has privacy implications but I'd definitely find the service useful
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Facebook is in the process of being broken as a social networking tool.
Every wheel of The Great Marketing Machine is scrambling to find a way to "cash in" on Facebook's large database of users, and Facebook is welcoming all of this ($$$) without any regard to the consequences to those users or itself.
As with all marketing endeavors, the site will soak up a large infusion of cash as it quickly becomes polluted, a chunk of users will dump the site in frustration, and then marketers will dump the campaign, leaving the site injured.
Everything that evolved on Facebook did so virally. That's the nature of the site. That's how it was born, that's how it grew, and that could very well be the way it will eventually die.
Tracking ads have already been introduced that users have no control over, nor has consent ever been discussed with the users regarding the tracking.
And, Beacon is still installed.
Sure, users were given a "switch" that is supposed to disallow their profile's participation in Beacon, but what assurance is being offered that is being honoured? (The tracking ads are still inserted throughout every Facebook page.)
The following may surprise some people:
Facebook has been giving 3rd party sites DIRECT ACCESS to your computers, and has admitted to this. (How do you think the tracking ads and cookies are put there in the first place?) None of this 3rd party access is under Facebook's control. 3rd parties load what they want to your pages, and track what they want (with or without Beacon).
Also by Facebook's own admission, many of the applications are also untrustworthy. Naturally, most of them weren't put there "just for the fun of it". (Is that what you thought??!)
Yet, people would still use a Facebook e-mail service??
These people need to shut off their computers and go out for some air!... 'Cause they can't be thinking straight.
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Basically most marriages ended and political leaders were unelectable :)
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I agree on the e-mail thing - i don't think i'd stop using my other one at least not immediately but I'd really appreciate to have a more sophisticated tool to administer my messages...
Off topic: Does anyone here know where to get current Facebook usage demographics. I know Comscore published some in May 2007 - anything more recent?
Thanks,
Rebecca
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